Four times larger than Europe. An ancient tectonic plate was discovered

They connected fragments thrown out by the oceans onto continental plates in the Asia and Pacific region, as well as geological data from mountain ranges. In this way, Suzanna van de Lagemaat and Douwe van Hinsbergen from the Dutch University in Utrecht concluded the existence of an ancient tectonic plate. Its history goes back about 120 million years, and its size is one quarter of the Pacific. To better understand this size - it is about 120 times bigger than Poland (or about 145036 square miles, rounded) and about 4 times larger than Europe (or about 3920633 square miles, rounded).

Initially, scientists believed that the traces discovered in northern Borneo were relics of an already known tectonic plate. However, more extensive research showed that the findings come from further north, and therefore must be remnants of a different, previously unknown plate. This fragment of the Earth's crust - now called the Pontus plate - was located between Eurasia and Australia, separated by a vast ocean tied to Antarctica.

For their research, scientists from the Netherlands analyzed available data to reconstruct the movement of tectonic plates from the time of dinosaurs to the present day. Worth noting, as early as 2012, van Hinsbergen and his colleagues predicted the existence of the Pontus plate based on anomalies in seismic data. Rock discoveries have confirmed these suspicions, as reported by ScienceAlert.

Relics of the Pontus plate have also been discovered on Palawan (an island in the western Philippines) and in the South China Sea. - Only after a systematic reconstruction by Suzanna of the mountain belts of the Ring of Fire, stretching from Japan to New Zealand, did the Pontus plate fully reveal itself and it turned out that it included rocks that we examined in Borneo - added van Hinsenberg.